Norris and Piastri duelled in F1's hotly-contested Austrian GP

In the aborted prelude to the Austrian Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso remarked that his seat was probably approaching around “200 degrees”, as he waited on the grid for an additional 15 minutes in anticipation of a second formation lap. The man who instigated the delay, Carlos Sainz, had been left stranded on the grid as the recalcitrance of his Williams kept him stuck in his grid box.

When Sainz suffered a pitlane brake fire having eventually coaxed motion out of his machinery, his seat was likely reaching the rump-searing temperatures that his countryman faced before being told to exit his dying FW47 before the start.

But the heat emanating from their pews paled in comparison to that faced by Lando Norris in the opening 20 laps of the race. Oscar Piastri fanned the flames underneath his team-mate's seat relentlessly over the race’s first act, with the intent to provoke Norris into a misjudgement. Despite the rippling undercurrent of their clash two weeks prior in Canada, McLaren continued to let its two drivers spar on track – thus, laying the battleground pieces for the siege Norris was set to withstand.

Much has been made of Norris’ mental strength this year. Unflinchingly honest about the self-doubt that occasionally churns around his thought patterns like a tumble dryer full of linen, he doesn’t entirely conform to the image of what many consider to be a driver with a ‘champion’s mentality’. But if his assured defence of his lead in those opening stages doesn’t denote strength, then little else will.

Unwittingly, Norris had given Piastri a helping hand in making a protracted assault possible. Aware that his fellow front-row starter, Charles Leclerc, was committed to making life difficult for the McLarens at the start, Norris moved across to cover the scarlet car.

Leclerc was pacified, but boxed in. Piastri had the momentum to cruise around the outside, and the immediately thought about doubling his first-lap gains with a look into the uphill Turn 3. Norris held the line, and a further challenge into Turn 4 was less forthcoming; the order was subsequently put on ice when Andrea Kimi Antonelli T-boned Max Verstappen at Turn 3.

Antonelli slams into Verstappen and takes both of them out - and is later given a three-place grid penalty for next weekend's British GP

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

A mild way of setting that particular scene would be to say that Antonelli was a touch ambitious. Verstappen, beset by horrendous luck in qualifying when his second flying lap was cut short by yellow flags lingering from Pierre Gasly’s Turn 10 spin, must have wonder if he’d been hexed for the weekend. In the Turn 3 scrum, where Verstappen was aiming to pressure George Russell and the Ferraris after clearing Liam Lawson, he found himself facing the wrong way and out of the race. In stark contrast to two weeks ago, Antonelli’s approach was incredibly sloppy, and ultimately produced a safety car.

It lasted just two full laps, before Norris got the field going again. His target was to break the chance of a DRS tow from Piastri, and went pretty early in order to do so. Once the safety car was clear, Norris bolted out of Turn 8 and attempted to gap Piastri over the course of the fourth lap.

It was almost enough, but not quite. Piastri had kept a toe in the DRS door to the tune of a 0.9s gap, ensuring he’d benefit from the greater straightline speed up the hill. Thus began a duel that raged on for the opening 20 laps. This wasn’t just about track position either, but also pit priority; McLaren was planning to stop whichever of its two charges was in the lead by the time a satisfactory gap had opened on-track.

Piastri’s explosive pace in the opening phases forced Norris into a position he didn’t want to be in. The Briton can be relied upon to bank some early tyre management laps, especially when in the pack; this usually allows him the scope to carve out an advantage on tyre life over the course of the stint. He appears docile in the opening laps but, with the pit phases approaching, he begins to get into his stride.

"I knew what our pitstop window was going to be or was planning to be. I thought there was no chance we're going make it to the pitstop here" Lando Norris

But with Piastri, as Christian Horner so eloquently put it, “making love to his exhaust pipe for lap after lap”, Norris didn’t get the chance to do this. He had to hit the ground running from the moment the safety car peeled into the pitlane, tearing away any veneer of comfort at the front.

Let’s distil that into the key chances for Piastri. After spending the opening nine laps tracking Norris down like a fleet-footed deer, the Australian revised his approach for the 10th. Rather than attempting to shape for a move with DRS, he prioritised his lines through the middle sector instead; Norris had been able to bat off the DRS threat, and was perilously close to shattering the one-second gap through his mid-sector pace. Piastri thus revised his corner entry into Turn 6, maintaining grip but importantly minimising the dirty air effect experienced by following Norris directly.

In maintaining the momentum through the tail end of the lap, Piastri could smell Norris’ cologne into Turn 1 of the 11th lap – but held off, knowing Turn 3 was the better place to try a move. Norris went to the inside early, but Piastri bombed past on the outside line and – crucially, for Norris – got ahead by the DRS detection zone. This gave Norris the ammunition to reclaim the place in Turn 4, albeit with his DRS closing marginally early for the corner.

Piastri's lead wouldn't last one corner as Norris blast back by at Turn 4

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

While Piastri had a brief view down the inside for Turn 6, Norris nonetheless held the corner as his team-mate opted for discretion.

“[I was pushing], especially stint one,” Norris explained. “I think we got 10 laps in, and the gap [to the Ferraris] was already, like, five seconds. And I knew what our pitstop window was going to be or was planning to be. I thought there was no chance we're going make it to the pitstop here.”

Norris then got slightly loose towards the end of the 14th tour, as his tyres were screaming hot under the pressure from Piastri. The rear end buckled and sought refuge in the gravel off-line at Turn 9, doing so again on Turn 10’s exit. Piastri was once again close, but never fashioned that into a potential move.

Piastri shaped for another move on lap 20, becoming increasingly keen to make a move as the pit window was now open for the McLarens between Russell and the impressive Gabriel Bortoleto. McLaren's strategists and engineers immediately tensed up at this attempt to make the move on Norris at Turn 4; Piastri locked up, very narrowly avoiding contact with the race leader. There was centimetres in it; Piastri was told not to do that again by engineer Tom Stallard.

Norris pitted directly after, getting the speedy boarding service having retained the lead. The left-front wheel was slow on, thus risking a potential time loss to Piastri, but it stabilised once Norris found some solid pace on the out-lap. When the idea of extending his stint was put to the now-leading Piastri, framed as “a 1.5s gap [to stop now] or a 4s gap with tyre delta”, the Australian took the latter.

“I knew that I was always going to be pitting second in that scenario,” Piastri explained after. “For me, it felt like if I couldn't stay within DRS, then getting back inside one second was going to be very, very tough. So, I kind of wanted to go a bit different and give myself some fresher tyres and hopefully be able to use them at the end of the stint. It didn't really pan out that way, unfortunately, but that was the thinking at least.”

Norris kept the lead to be serviced first by McLaren which was vital to his victory hopes

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

By the time Piastri had stopped, having ended up with a near-equal dilatory application of his front-left wheel, the gap was actually around 5.5s. Still, Piastri’s hard tyres were about four laps younger – and he set to work on closing down that gap with a much stronger run of pace in the higher-speed corners.

Norris was warned about Piastri’s better speed through the second half of the lap. Regardless, last year’s championship runner-up felt slightly more comfortable; he explained that he was unable to fully charge his battery under the pressure from Piastri early on, but was able to keep it topped up when under much less scrutiny.

At one stage, Norris got the lead up to 6.5s, but Piastri perhaps had tried to massage the tyre delta further. No matter, as Piastri began to scythe through the gap and started picking up the pace – and Norris started to encounter the effect of traffic, which also helped Piastri during the middle stages of the race. “After the first stop, maybe we didn't do the right thing giving Lando some breathing room,” Piastri mused, as the lead then began to stabilise again.

Colapinto went slightly wide in attempting to pass Tsunoda at Turn 3, and in an effort to reclaim the slipstream, the Alpine driver chopped across Piastri and ran him onto the grass

At one point, Piastri was just 3.3s back, but a Turn 1 miscue worked in Norris’ favour. Having then got the arrears back down to 3.9s, Norris pitted – being told that he was facing ‘the Germany situation’. Presumably, this is a reference to McLaren’s decision to keep Carlos Sainz out on wet tyres during the 2019 German Grand Prix during a safety car, a situation where Sainz very quickly found that the circuit was too dry when the safety car returned to the pits. McLaren appears to have adapted this into code for a critical, potentially sliding-doors-moment pitstop that needed to be made; had Norris not stopped at that particular juncture, Piastri might well have had the pace to overcut his team-mate.

This worked for Norris’ side of the garage, as he’d pitted for mediums at the end of lap 52 and emerged just in front of traffic in the shape of Yuki Tsunoda and Franco Colapinto. The two had endured terrible races and were battling fiercely over scraps, but Norris did well to remain ahead; Piastri’s side of the garage responded to take the same compound a lap later, but the Melburnian ended up just behind the warring backmarkers. It very nearly hurt Piastri, in needless fashion.

Colapinto went slightly wide in attempting to pass Tsunoda at Turn 3, and in an effort to reclaim the slipstream, the Alpine driver chopped across Piastri and ran him onto the grass; a few more centimetres to the right and, Piastri’s victory hopes would have been pushing up the daisies rather than lopping their heads off with his front wing.

Tsunoda and Colapinto squabbling almost saw Piastri put into the barrier by the Alpine driver

Photo by: Michael Potts / Motorsport Images

Traffic giveth, and traffic taketh away. Norris then found himself losing time to Isack Hadjar, which helped Piastri bring the lead down to around two seconds. “I need some pace, please help,” Norris pleaded, knowing that the sister MCL39 was getting much larger in his mirrors. His race engineer Will Joseph theorised that much of the high-speed deficit was due to the effect of traffic, and Piastri was yet to experience the worst of it; Norris seemed to be encountering the lion’s share of it within the middle sector. Front wing damage was also reported, Joseph suggesting this was culpable for any balance shifts experienced.

But, with three laps remaining, Piastri’s charge – which had boiled down to around 1.8s in arrears to Norris – stalled out thanks to a final dice with soon-to-be-lapped runners. Norris picked his way through the battling Alonso and Bortoleto, as the master-and-padawan duo rattled sabres over seventh place, but Piastri ended up too far behind them to cut through. His impressive efforts to wrest victory from Norris halted at the final hurdle.

Arguably, it was the opening pit call that did most of the damage to Piastri’s hopes, and he wondered if reacting directly to Norris might have been the better choice in Austria. He reckoned that the 1.5s gap might have been difficult to break down into a DRS-friendly chunk with similar tyre ages, but Piastri’s prodigious pace in the early laps suggested that he should have been able to close Norris down.